The problem with a desk job is, well, the mind can wander. To influence the humble hourly employee or perhaps used as a fix for a personal addiction, people on occasion bring donuts to work. The psychological interplay with those dozen fried and frosted pastries is the source of fascination for the simple mind of the idle writer … So we hid a camera and filmed it.
Twelve donuts, pink box, plastic knife: cinnamon roll, maple bar, white cake sprinkles, chocolate cake sprinkles, two glazed, French cruller (vanilla frosting), two glazed twists, glazed old fashion, cake with strawberry frosting and devil’s food cake chocolate frosting and nuts. Seven donut holes. The box arrives at 9:30 AM Monday.
The first moves are predictable. Three workers, all male, sniff out sugar-coated deliciousness at 9:41. The biggest guy lifts the box lid like a guy pops the hood on an old Chevy. He grabs the cinnamon roll with the left and a hole with the right. By the time he pivots, barging his way past the other two guys the donut hole and the outer ring of the cinnamon roll are gone. He’s a professional. Like a vulture on a fresh kill, his co-workers approach the box shoulder to shoulder. The old fashion is gone, a twist is gone, plus two more donut holes. It’s a game of chess, a game of Jenga with donuts pulled from the stack with steady hands and strategic intent. The film doesn’t lie.
A young lady approaches at 10:03. Homely but nice. She knows she’s a girl in a man’s world. She wants a donut, uses the knife to get a better angle of the choices. She pauses, assessing the potential for judgment. Two minutes later she drops the knife and leaves with a donut hole. It can only be described as donut disappointment.
The initial rush has subsided. It’s a little before eleven. The two donuts with sprinkles are gone, a guy in the art department and an older gal from accounting who clearly had not walked all that way for a fuckin’ donut hole. As lunchtime draws near the usual suspects are all that’s left. Everything glazed is gone sans two holes. The cruller, strawberry cake, the nut-covered donut and half of the maple bar sit at the bottom of the box, kinda sad, like girls that didn’t get asked to dance.
The film reveals that no female engaged with a glazed product or a twist. Donut wisdom suggests that they’re too sticky, too clumsy to subdivide and not easily sawed apart with a plastic knife. These are, of course, crude, piggish and stereotypical observations but the words and concepts the donuts speak cannot be discarded.
People forget the presence of donuts after lunch … until about 3:30 when the nocturnal employees leave their workspaces to scavenge for the sustenance that can give the white-collar worker the strength to complete the day. The donut holes are stiff but not too stiff and two junior associates quickly snatch them and pop them in their mouths with a note of shame. The quickness of their actions suggest that they desire their afternoon donut pursuit to go unnoticed, on this day, it doesn’t.
This is where things get interesting. The overall intent of this video research, a gift to society really, isn’t just to confirm the pecking order of donut popularity, but to better understand the shelf life of the typical box of donuts and to document the disgusting nature of humans (mostly men). It’s closing time on Monday night. The donut box has numerous grease splotches that can be seen from the outside of the box. The inside of the box is disheveled like the Christmas candy shelf at Walmart at 11:45 on Christmas Eve. There are sugar bits and sprinkles and donut particles and parts everywhere, the donuts have been pushed around and flipped over and turned sideways after a long day of examination and the cake donuts have been treated like so many hockey pucks flipped across a sheet of ice.
On Tuesday morning, our three and a half donuts await their fate. They’ve been up all night, the lid to their box flipped open and their molecular structure has surely been expanding and contracting with the building’s automatic airflow. My decades of experience with donut observation tells me that, to someone, these donuts are still perfectly edible. I know that the basic food preservation protocols and the typical food freshness limits don’t apply to donuts. I know that even the most fastidious office worker will hit yesterday’s donuts the same way a frat boy will try leftover chips and dip from last night’s kegger.
So here he comes. It’s 8:30 on Tuesday morning and a male coworker comes within shouting distance of the pink box. It’s not clear whether he was just in the area for business or he remembered the potential for donuts and was making a premeditated strike. He picks up the knife. They always pick up the knife on the second day. He jabs and pokes at the poor donuts like they were cockroaches, as if they might move. I have come to theorize that this prodding is an attempt to better understand the general condition of the donut, and even though this guy is totally alone, the first one to arrive at the office, the knife action is also a stalling technique as he goes through the mental checklist of reasons that justify what he’s about to do. He cuts the strawberry cake in half and then, surprisingly, does the same to the chocolate nut. It’s hard to gauge whether he is torn by the choices or challenged by the concept. He puts the knife down and grabs half of the strawberry cake.
This behavior could be anticipated, but it was nice to see it confirmed on film. The cake donuts are better second-day eating candidates because people can talk themselves into the fact that somewhere inside there’s still a soft, relatively uncontaminated cake part. The overnight airflow would have made a yeast donut like the maple bar half or the cruller lesser choices. Now that the cake donuts have been cut in half, their chance for consumption increases because their reduced portion size is easier to rationalize. All logic indicates that unless our remaining donuts are eaten this morning – roughly thirty hours after purchase – they won’t be eaten at all.
People circle and glance at the oily pink box all morning. Lots of people touch the knife and the general vibe is that the donut box has crossed the chasm from breakfast treats to lab experiment. Then, out of nowhere, an employee that had yet to participate in any of the donut games walks up to the box, looks in over the pink ledge like a guy at the zoo peering down into the bear enclosure and plucks the strawberry cake and throws it down. Just like that! It was about 11:30 and young workers with no lunch plans can make flakey decisions.
Donut day three, Wednesday. We still have the french cruller, the cut-in-half chocolate nut cake and half of a maple bar. You still get the occasional prospective customer, always picking up the knife, moving the pieces around as if seeing what’s left in just the right light might unlock new freshness. You can tell by the looks on faces that some people are trying to do the math in their heads about just how long these donuts have been sitting there … Did someone bring these yesterday? It couldn’t have been Monday, could it? No one seems to seriously consider eating what’s left, but no one ever says anything about throwing the box out.
We felt we had to end the research project at the end of business on Wednesday. So what did we learn?
- Well, we would have expected that the maple bar would have been an early-first-day selection. We felt bad for it and came to believe that the somewhat usual act of cutting it in half hurt its chance to have a better life.
- French crullers are a dumb donut the people don’t want or understand. The French should stick to croissants.
- Putting sprinkles on any donut greatly increases its consumability and weird, non-traditional colors or nuts hurt a donut’s chances.
- People think donuts have no expiration date and when people believe they’re alone, they really want to be with donuts.